Welles and Hemingway: how two titans clashed over Spain

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A new manuscript reveals how the director blamed the writer for the creation of the “macho tourist”

Orson Welles was 22 and working as a voice artist when he first met the author Ernest Hemingway in 1937. The pair locked horns in a Manhattan recording studio, where Welles, a precocious young upstart who had already ruffled feathers by staging an all-black production of Macbeth, was supposed to be narrating a Spanish Civil War documentary which Hemingway had written.

Unfortunately, though, Welles decided to offer a few suggestions to improve Hemingway’s script. The conversation ended in fisticuffs, with the two men scrapping on the floor, before cracking open a bottle of whisky, and sloshing their way into a strange friendship.

Orson Welles in 1937Credit:
Rex

But while Welles always maintained the two men were allies, it appears their relationship was characterised as much by antagonism and rivalry as by manly kinship. As reported in the Observer, the discovery of a previously unpublished manuscript suggests Welles felt little but loathing towards his friend’s “macho enthusiasms”.

The document, which is presented in a new book, At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City, is a script Welles co-wrote in 1973 with Oja Kodar, his long-time companion and artistic collaborator. Titled Crazy Weather, it details a love triangle set in Spain, and features an American bullfighting aficionado – clearly inspired by Hemingway – as its lead character.

Unearthed by author Dr. Matthew Asprey Gear, an Australian academic, the script suggests a deeply rooted scepticism concerning the type of macho tourist frequently spotted in Spain once mass travel had taken off in the 1950s and 1960s.

Both Welles and Hemingway were known for their love of Spain. Hemingway’s novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Death in the Afternoon (1932), were both devoted to the custom of Spanish bullfighting. By the time Welles lived in Spain, during the 1960s, he had seen at first-hand what he thought of as the legacy of Hemingway’s work.

“By late 1973, he was thoroughly disgusted by the superficial appropriation of Spanish culture by American tourists,” Gear is reported as saying. “He really detested the machismo. He clearly had that in mind when he wrote Crazy Weather.”

The lead character in the script is Jim Foster, married to a Spanish woman. Despite having lived in Spain for years he speaks the language in a “limited and rather stilted” form, and is mocked relentlessly for the clichéd ideas he has concerning his adopted country.

Gear says the discovery has led him to believe that Welles was only being generous when he referred to Hemingway as his friend. “I’ve heard from other sources that Hemingway didn’t really like him at all and was wary of him,” says Gear.

Crazy Weather is not the only script Hemingway inspired Welles to write. Supposedly their original meeting in the recording booth in 1937 prompted an unfinished feature film, which remains locked away until a contractual dispute is resolved.